Dennis Ritchie: Forgotten Tech Legend

By Josh Highland in Josh's Rambling

This year we lost two great tech founders, Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie.

Steve Jobs death was plastered all over the news and media, and it should be. Steve Jobs was a great visionary who changed the world. I’m typing this on my MacBook Pro with my iPhone sitting right next to me. I love Apple.

Dennie Ritchie was also a great man of technology. He was less public than Jobs, but in my opinion more influential than Steve Jobs. Dennis Ritchie created the programming language C, which is foundational to almost all modern programming languages, including Objective-C, the language that all iPhone apps are written in. Ritchie is also the father of Unix, the operating system that powers most of the internet, and all Mac computers. Macs are known for their stability. That stability comes from it’s operating system, a modified version of Unix. Without Ritchie, Apple wouldn’t exist. Despite how influential Dennie Ritchie was, I didn’t see a single news story on his death.

I respect both of these men and honor the things they created. Without them my life would be much different. In a perfect world the people behind the scenes, like Dennis Ritchie, would get true attention and notoriety they truly deserve.

 

Mac: Converting a directory of images into JPG files

By Josh Highland in mac, tutorials

Recently I was presented with a problem where I had a directory of about 1000 graphic files of mixed formats (png, gif, bmp, jpg), and I needed to convert them all to jpg files.

I tried various solutions but I ended using the following command in my Mac’s terminal.

mkdir jpegs; sips -s format jpeg *.* --out jpgs

This command creates directory called “jpgs”, and converts all of the files in the current directory into .jpg format, and moves them into the newly created “jpgs” direcotry.

It truly saved the day.